>Seems to me that the local scale means the high costs of production for
>many modern goodies are spread over a smaller market. So rather than
>spreading the costs of a handful of plants over a massive market, you
>duplicate many of those costs unnecessarily (even at smaller capacities)
>and spread them over markets so small they may not even be able to
>sustain the process.
Yup. Of course, if the aim is to deindustrialize and deurbanize, then localism makes sense. But many advocates of localism are coy about that. They also talk about reducing the human population, and don't say how they propose to get there.
Doug